r/chessprogramming

I used to love playing massively multiplayer games like runescape growing up, and have played chess.com daily my whole life

I had the idea to build a chess MMO. What if chess was open world, a social experience? Where your wins give you trophies that you can then upgrade your character with? Where you can walk around and spectate matches, or have others watch and chat about your match?

So I spent the last 6 months building chessmmo.gg, it's been out for about 3 weeks. It's currently a mobile app on the apple and google play store, and you can play in browser too if you're on desktop/pc. I have plans to get it on Steam soon as well.

It's honestly been a dream come true so far. You can currently accrue trophies to level up your character, grind your ELO, get custom chess piece skins, buy pets, and even purchase a home and invite friends to play in it. There's also a social round-based puzzle arena that's like a battle royale with progressively harder puzzles. I'm currently building a tournament hall where there will be daily swiss-style tournaments. Lot's of expansions are on the way

I would love to get the community feedback, hoping to get more players online and a more active discord!

Here is a link to the game if you'd like to try it out:

chessmmo.gg

ios app

android app

discord

Hi everybody, I’m a junior in high school and a competitive varsity player. Like a lot of you, I got tired of staring at the Chess.com game review screen and not improving from it. Seeing a red bubble that says "Blunder" tells you what went wrong in that exact moment, but it doesn't tell you why you keep making that same class of mistake game after game.

To fix this, I’ve been building ChessDx. Instead of move-by-move analysis, it’s an automated pattern diagnosis engine.

Here’s how it works:

• Game Ingestion: It automatically pulls your last 50–100 games via the Chess.com or Lichess public APIs.
• The Diagnostic Core: It runs your history through Stockfish, calculates centipawn loss, and maps your blunders across 6 dimensions: Openings, Tactical Patterns, Positional Play, Endgame Technique, Time Management, and Psychological/Tilt.
• The Diagnosis Profile: You get a clean radar chart showing your exact breakdown of mistakes.
• Adaptive Training Plans: An agentic layer takes your profile and builds a structured, 7-day training plan with daily puzzle sets pulled dynamically from the Lichess database to target your specific bottleneck.

I'm also building out a team-tier dashboard specifically for high school chess coaches so they can track an entire roster's weaknesses, assign drills, and spot regression instantly.

I’m opening up a private beta soon to test the data pipelines and the classification accuracy before the next school season hits. If you're a club player (800–1600 ELO) or a team coach, I’d love your feedback.

If you want to grab a spot in the beta or just help me out by answering a few quick questions, please fill out the form below!

https://forms.gle/NzaEBXnSrajg7BGu5

Playing a bot that randomizes the position and I genuinely cannot figure out if I'm winning or losing in a bullet game. Send help.

Hey all — a few weeks ago I posted about my paper being accepted to the IEEE Conference on Games 2026 on using preference learning to improve fine-tuning for Maia-style chess models.

Since then I’ve been building out the ideas further in a website called garrychess.ai.

Last night I released a feature that lets anyone:

• import their Chess.com or Lichess games
• train a personalized chess bot from their own games
• play against it in-browser
• share the bot with friends via a public link

The system tries to preserve stylistic tendencies rather than simply maximize engine strength.

I’ve also been experimenting with style embeddings trained on a few million games to estimate similarity between players and various grandmasters. The same embeddings are currently being used to cluster puzzles by style/archetype (e.g. positional/Karpov-like middlegames vs sharper tactical positions).

Some observations so far:

• openings are surprisingly reproducible from relatively small datasets
• it picks up a mixed style if multiple people play on the account. My girlfriend's style clusters were nakamura (counter attacker) for middle game (when I sometimes start playing) and fischer endgame.
• My bot seemed to capture my stronger intensity in the lategame and blunder propensity midgame.

Training currently costs $1 per bot to roughly cover GPU/training costs. Playing against generated bots and the style-based puzzle features are free.

If anyone here tries it, I’d love feedback on:

• realism of the generated bots
• evaluation ideas for stylistic fidelity
• better approaches for human-like search/sampling
• whether the style clustering actually feels meaningful

I’ve been experimenting with a Discord-native chess workflow and ended up building a bot for my server that automatically analyzes our Lichess games after they finish.

The idea was making improvement feel more conversational/social instead of constantly jumping between tabs, engines, videos, etc.

The bot:

• posts automatic game analysis
• creates discussion threads per game
• lets you ask questions about positions with /ask
• can replay positions directly inside Discord

I attached a quick 30-second demo video showing how it works.

One interesting thing I noticed:
people discuss their mistakes WAY more when the analysis appears directly inside their community chat, really pushes you to play more and improve.

I’m curious what chess players think:

• would something like this actually help you improve?
• what features would make it more useful?
• what would make it feel less “AI gimmick” and more like a real coach?

Would genuinely love feedback.

Hey,

About me, briefly: software engineer for ~20 years, chess is my hobby (online + OTB). The rest is more interesting.

The twist: Kingside is built primarily through AI (Claude). I drive architecture, product decisions, and the chess-domain side; the AI writes the code. The team is tiny — but with domain knowledge plus AI as the build muscle, iteration speed is honestly absurd. A feature request on the feedback board can go from idea to production in hours. Not days, not sprints — hours.

Some recent examples:

• Precision Training (a new mode where you defend winning positions against Stockfish) — designed and shipped end-to-end in one workday
• Drill exercises (board-vision tasks like "find all checks", "count attackers on e5") — built and live in a single session
• User-created courses with interactive quizzes and annotated diagrams — shipped in 2 days

And here's the fun part: you can shape what gets built next. There's a Feedback section right on the site — drop your idea, and there's a real chance it'll be live by the time you check back. No roadmap committees, no "we'll consider it for Q3." If it makes sense, it ships.

What you can actually do on the platform:

• Play — bullet to classical with custom time controls, separate Glicko rating per format. Plus play vs Stockfish at any strength (levels 1–20)
• Analyze your games — paste a PGN, Stockfish 18 runs right in your browser. Best line and multi-PV, every move tagged (?! / ? / ??), Win-Draw-Loss bar on the critical ones. Save and share an analysis link
• Import your games — pull from your Lichess or chess.com username directly, or upload a PGN file. Personal Workshop with all your games in one place
• Precision Training — engine-defense puzzles: a position right after a blunder, you take the winning side and have to hold the advantage against Stockfish for several moves. Full post-game review afterwards
• Train tactics — dozens of themes (forks, pins, mates, endgames, sacrifices, defensive moves...), filter by what you want. Daily puzzle. The platform also keeps a quiet mistakes diary of themes you fail most often, with a dedicated practice page for them
• Generate puzzles from your own games — paste a PGN, the engine finds your blunders and turns them into puzzles you can replay
• Drill exercises — board-vision training, not tactics. Count attackers on a square, find all checks, find pins, find forks, find loose or hanging pieces, find undefended attacks. Drill Sprint mode with leaderboards
• Puzzle Rush — 3-minute and 5-minute modes, leaderboards for both
• Master games archive — browse and search a database of master games by player, event, opening, or position (paste a FEN to find every game that reached it). Move-tree explorer from any position
• Build your own courses — write chess lessons with text and diagrams (arrows, highlighted squares), interactive quizzes, position trainers, opening drills, and endgame drills against Stockfish. Publish for everyone or keep private. Built-in spaced repetition for reviews
• Tournaments — Arena, Swiss, Round Robin. Public or invite-only, custom time controls and scoring
• Watch live broadcasts — major OTB events via the Lichess Broadcasts API, plus a separate relay for tournaments that aren't on Lichess
• Watch live games — see what other players on the platform are playing right now
• Bridge your own engine — if your machine struggles with browser Stockfish, run it locally and connect via WebSocket. Browser UI, your hardware
• Plus the basics: friends, direct messages, challenge friends, customizable boards, English + Russian interface, log in with Google or Telegram

Everything is free, no paywall.

Credit where it's due: the tactics puzzle database is the open Lichess puzzle dataset, and live tournament broadcasts pull from Lichess's public broadcast API (with a separate relay covering events that aren't on Lichess). Both data sources are open by design — we built the UI and integration on top, but the underlying data is theirs.

A small reality check, since this is going on a popular sub: despite a lot of work on optimization, we can't promise zero bugs at this stage — there will be rough edges. The site runs on AWS, but the team budget is tight, so the servers aren't the beefiest either. If you hit bugs or performance issues, please drop a note on the feedback board — we fix in order of impact.

I'm not claiming Kingside is better than chess.com or lichess overall — they've had years and large teams. The point is different: a small experienced team using AI well can ship serious chess features at a pace traditional dev cycles can't match. That's the experiment.

Site: kingside.site

Try it out, leave a feature request, and see how fast it gets built. What would you want to see added?

Hi, if you are chess interested and play chess online in lichess or chess(dot)com then you should test my app to make progress in your rating. Also real feedback are very important for me!

ALL TESTERS WILL GET A PROMO CODE FOR LIFETIME FREE USE AT RELEASE! - ALL UPDATES INCLUDED

Details to testing:

First you need to Join the test here to add your email adress to testers google group and then after 20 min. waiting you can download the app.

Join: https://groups.google.com/g/chess-diagnosics-app

Download: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.gamefrogs.chesscoach